anyone ever told you "premature optimization is the root of all evil"?

let me tell you a story. about computers and javascript and hitler and the soviet union.

a friend of mine just dug up some numbers and did some math for my dyscalculic ass and came up with the conclusion that just by transmitting the minified version of jquery around (not even executing it!), Planet Earth is likely using up somewhere between 7-14 billion kWh of power every year.

let's put that into some perspective.

world war two was the single deadliest conflict in human history. it killed somewhere around 80 million people, which at the time was three percent of *all humans, everywhere.* it left europe in ruins, and nowhere was the damage so intense and horrific as the Soviet Union.

the Battle of Stalingrad is one of the most famous battles of the war. two million people died there alone. in the opening salvos the entire city was flattened by nazi and soviet bombs alike. eventually the Union prevailed, at a tremendous cost.

but Stalingrad was only one of the cities flattened, only one of the battles fought as Europe burned. the devastation was so comprehensive that nearly every western nation had to rely on aid from the US, one of the only powers on either side whose economy was intact, to rebuild. (it didn't help that American wartime policy was designed more to inflict as much Nazi death and destruction as possible on the Soviets, of course).

if we add up the energy of every single explosive device detonated over the course of that terrible war, from hand grenades all the way up to the two atom bombs the US detonated over japan, slaughtering civilians en masse and turning two cities to rubble in the space of a moment, we get the figure of about 3 megatons. or in kilowatt hours, 3.4 billion, spread out across all those years of war.

compared to 7-14 billion kWh just to transmitting the same tangle of bytes around again and again. every single year.

and that's just jquery. not the cost of executing it. not the mass of other garbage javascript and analytics and social media spyware, which now often adds up to megabytes per page. not the cost of rendering or running any of that.

just to zap jquery back and forth across the internet to every computer accessing a website that uses it.

a final point of comparison, now that i have your attention: bitcoin uses up 46,000 billion kilowatt hours per year. a number which is likely to keep on growing.

also if you like someone’s creative work and you know they’re trans, subscribe to their heckin Patreon! commission their stuff! I promise it’s not appropriation!

see the thing is, a lot of us are *flat broke* because Discrimination, and even if a few of us do make Tech Money, it still doesn’t add up to enough resources for our community to uplift itself from within

hi cis friends! (if you’re reading this while not being trans, that’s you!!) the dk64 stream is over but you can still replicate the experience!!! here’s how:

1. look at #TransCrowdFund here or on birdsite until you find someone with an active gofundme/ko-fi/paypal/etc. (this part should take about five seconds)2. open the nearest window and stick your head out3. shout “TRANS RIGHTS” into the void as you smash that donate button

cool. seeing lots of takes. and i'm fucking tired and burnt out on this place. my only take about the hbomb stuff?

it shows that there's a groundswell of people who care enough about trans people to throw money, the lifeblood of our capitalist society, at helping trans people in a far more direct way than posting shitty thinkpieces.

as trans people, we tend to condemn cis people who don't understand, noting understanding is their work, not ours. then, when they try to understand, we tend to default to criticizing that as performative. this is fucking bullshit imo.

i really can't bring myself to believe, logically, that this whole thing is performative. for me, as a trans person, this whole fundraiser is giving me an amazing feeling. it seems like, maybe, random people are just starting to not default to hating us.

it's not ideal – ideally, it wouldn't be necessary. but it's setting up a strong precedent for 2019. a really fucking strong one.

Boston Municipal Ordinance section 741 part III section 5.a states that, during New England Patriots games, there must be a minimum of one very loud fan reacting appropriately per floor/wing of hotel rooms.